The Dearing Dialogue

This week the American Anthropological Association (AAA) layed out their long awaited position on the Human Terrain System (HTS).  Essentially, they criticized the US military for thinking it can use anthropology in an unjust war (Iraq and presumably Afghanistan included), but left open the future use of anthropology in the military, but of course only under the guidance of the AAA.  However, the only idea of guidance they provide is what the AAA considers “ethical”.  Are we ever to be in a circumstance which they can agree is completely “ethical”?  Anthropologists can not even agree upon precise definitions.  Thus, it should be little surprise that support of the AAA is waning.  I would not be surprised to see it break apart into splinter groups over this very topic.  The level of elitism spewing out of the ivory tower of the AAA leadership is paramount to the same arrogance they accuse the US leadership of. 

AAA Resolution

In the context of a war that is widely recognized as a denial of human rights and based on faulty intelligence and undemocratic principles, the Executive Board sees the HTS project as a problematic application of anthropological expertise, most specifically on ethical grounds.  We have grave concerns about the involvement of anthropological knowledge and skill in the HTS project.  The Executive Board views the HTS project as an unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.  

 

The Executive Board affirms that anthropology can and in fact is obliged to help improve U.S. government policies through the widest possible circulation of anthropological understanding in the public sphere, so as to contribute to a transparent and informed development and implementation of U.S. policy by robustly democratic processes of fact-finding, debate, dialogue, and deliberation.  It is in this way, the Executive Board affirms, that anthropology can legitimately and effectively help guide U.S. policy to serve the humane causes of global peace and social justice.

The New York Times posts a thought twister that bends the semantic reach of “rational” warfare (my own quotes).  Talking about the assassination of Abdul-Sattar Abu Reesha, a Sunni tribal leader in Iraq, the Times explains that he was the “leader of the American supported Sunni tribal uprising against extremist Islamist insurgents”.  This indeed, forced me to sigh and attempt to digest the meaning. 

It is an interesting suggestion that we accept some insurgents are not “extremist”, this is what I gather from the descriptive nature of the quote.  If that be the case, that gives the non-extremist insurgent a cassu belli; legitimacy against occupation? against the Iraqi government? legitimacy of some sort.  A question worth observation, but not when being observed from the eyes of the occuping power.  At this stage of the insurgency, it matters little which side has a legitimate role, in reality legitimacy is an illusion that greases the wheels of the insurgent or the state to go from one violent act to another.  An opiate that clouds reality, veils the guilt, and feeds the insatiable hunger of vengence for the insurgent and power for the empire.

Another interesting notion is our support for tribal uprisings.  How thin must that support be?  What conditions are paramount for that support.  Just listen to history shout at our ignorance and lack of attention.  Can we really expect Sunni “support” to be something more than a temporary conveniance for disempowered Sunnis to regain what they’ve lost. 

A last thing to consider.  Many of the Sunnis we’re arming now to rise up agaisnt the insurgents have killed Americans in battle.  This should be enough to infuriate the most ardent patriot and at least frustrate the apathetic. 

Packer writes a bit on the use of Human Terrain Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan in his New Yorker blog on July 20th.  He sees a growing relationship between social scientists and soldiers, a mixture typically considered taboo in the past.  The professionalization of both sides of the spectrum, coupled with theoretical and practical “antagonisms” led to what Packer explains as “isolated American sub-culutres”. 

This year, the Army is actually deploying teams of social scientists with units in Baghdad and Afghanistan (…) The best soldiers I met in Iraq were eager to share critical views with professors and journalists. This past spring, when McMaster led a group of officials and private citizens to Iraq to assess progress there, he picked as one member an anti-war British political-science professor who happens to know a great deal about the country. Desperate times breed desperate measures. 

While the disconnect between American culture and military culture has often caused the military to be shunned from college campuses in the past, and created contempt amongst the military community (as international relations professor Andrew Bacevich often writes about), the divisions are becoming less prominent.  Both sides are beginning to realize the utiliy of the other and that moral and political compromises are essential towards forging a coherent plan of success in US foreign policy.  Packer is indeed correct when he ends: 

But a superpower can hardly afford to have its thinkers and its warriors despise and avoid one another.

Also see:  DNI Conference

From NY Times, Sunday, July 22:

(…) when asked how the United States would respond if Al Qaeda were to plot a successful attack on the United States from the tribal areas (Pakistan), the answer from one intelligence officials was direct: “We’d go in and flatten it.”

Jon Lee Anderson writes a brilliant piece in the New Yorker on opium farming in Afghanistan.  Anderson travels to Oruzgan Province (red area on map) with the Afghan Eradication Force (AEF) and US DEA counternarcotics agent Douglas Wankel, who is overseeing the eradication process. 

Opium has now become a major counter-insurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Since last year, the production of opium has increased in Afghanistan by 60%.   The Taliban, who once considered opium harvesting unholy, now uses it as a means to control the population in Southern and Eastern Afghanistan - areas of greatest Taliban influence.  The coalition is at odds in how to deal with a product that is both sustaining the power of the Taliban and the livelihood of local residents.  Dutch forces are using a stand-off approach focused on making the Taliban an irrelevant presence and an unpopular choice for residents by promoting alternative crops.  DEA agent, Wankel is apprehensive:

“Most or all Europeans are opposed to eradication—they’re into winning hearts and minds,” he said. “But it’s our view that it isn’t going to work. There has to be a measured, balanced use of force along with hearts and minds.” He conceded, however, that the Uruzgan operation fell squarely on the use-of-force side of the scale. Later, he told me, aid, seed, and fertilizer would be offered to the farmers around Tirin Kot, but not yet. Other Americans were frankly contemptuous of the Dutch policy, which they regarded as softheaded.”

Of course, when alternatives don’t exist, the farmers will fall back on what they know best and what has supported them in the past.  Opium will give them over $500 an acre of harvest, while wheat may net $50 an acre.  At the same time, development from the Kabul is unequal and often corrupt.  It is based on tribal loyalties according to one local Afghan in Anderson’s article:

“The Karzai government doesn’t give the money to poor farmers growing poppy. It gives it only to its friends who grow it”—corrupt officials and landowners with political influence. (Many of the farmers were sharecroppers.) “We would be happy to stop growing opium if they would give us some help, and stop giving the money meant for us to thieves.” Instead of receiving aid from government officials, Ahmad said, “if they tell us to break the poppies, we must pay them not to.”

At the same time, areas where the Taliban are strongest tend to go untouched in the eradication process.  Whereas, areas with the greatest influence from the central government are hit hard and tend to alienate the local residents. 

It has also proven virtually impossible to conduct in districts where the Taliban are relatively strong, thereby inevitably penalizing farmers in pro-government districts.”

And corruption is enemic within the central government.  In a previous entry, I explained how one governor was arrested for holding tons of opium in his provincial office.  In Anderson’s article, he finds the AEF police providing security are working with sticky hands:

I walked past one of the jeeps where some of Qassem’s policemen, dressed in robes and sparkly skullcaps, were laughing and talking with the opium growers. I caught a whiff of something burning as I passed. They were smoking hashish.

The opium harvest is a linchpin that must be addressed in the broader context of the Taliban insurgency.  We must focus on alternatives for local farmers and provide those as incentives to steer residents away from Taliban influence.  Understanding the human terrain of Oruzgan and other provinces is the only way to ensure we quell insurgent complicity, but to prevent it from perpetuating itself.

A video report by Jeffrey Gettleman on the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF) in eastern portion of Ethiopia.  The Ogaden people are ethnic Somalis.  The ONLF are fighting a political battle for independence from Ethiopia.  Their mission statement states they are “a grassroots social and political movement (…) as both an advocate for and defender of the people is dedicated to restoring the rights of Somalis in Ogaden to self-determination, peace, development, and democracy”.

Understanding this organization is paramount in attempting to stabilize Somalia. 

ONLF website

According to today’s L.A. Times article (Influx of Al Qaeda), money is flowing from Iraq to Pakistan to fund the scores of terrorist training camps there.  A former CIA official remarked:   “that the resurgent Taliban forces in Afghanistan are ‘being schooled’ by Al Qaeda operatives with experience fighting U.S. forces in Iraq.”

The CIA is further developing a new form of covert operative since 9/11, one that can use both the analysis and operations side of the agency.

These so-called “targeting officers” are given a blend of analytic and operational training to become specialists in sifting clues to the locations of high-value fugitives.

The CIA’s ability to send spies into the tribal region is limited, officials said.

“We can’t go into the tribal areas without protection,” said the former CIA official who was involved in the planning of the surge. “For the most part they have to travel with [the Pakistan intelligence service] and their footprint is not small because they’re worried about getting shot too.”

Instead, the effort is designed to cultivate sources in the outer perimeters of the security networks that guard Bin Laden, and gradually work inward.

The aim, another former CIA official said, is “to find people who had access to people who had access to his movements. It’s pretty basic stuff.”

Still, without an inside look at the the clan and tribal elements from where insurgent and terrorist factions arise out of, the CIA is not likely to get even close to breaking up these cells.  Looking with binoculars from an ISI Toyota at the guy who sells bread to the guy who goes to the mosque with the guy that once saw Zawahiri at the public toilet, is a waste of money.

I read a few days back, as I do nearly everyday, the list of names printed in the NY Times of soldiers that have died.  One name stood out:  Lt. Andrew Bacevich Jr.  I recognized the name from a professor I had listened to back in 2005 at Berkeley.  I was hoping the connection was not real.  But I was wrong.  The son of Prof. Andrew Bacevich died from a suicide car bomber in Iraq.  He was the only son of the professor.  It is a shame that it came to this.  I can’t even imagine the grief he is going through.  Grief that is only beginning to work its way into the fabric of our society as a whole.

Former Soldier, Now a Professor, Losses his Only Son to a War He Actively Opposed

A Dutch and Afghan military patrol in Oruzgan Province of Afghanistan rolled into a police station and found:

The police officers there were cultivating poppy within the compound’s walls, openly participating in the heroin trade. The Afghan Army squad that visited them, itself only partly equipped, did nothing.  (NY Times)

Poppy production is the #1 export for the new Afghan economy.  Eradicating the problem will take more than simply burning fields or preventing the harvest of crops.  Professor Thomas Johnson at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey suggests the US buys all existing poppy and use it for medicinal purposes in the States, such as production of morphine.  Then we provide the Afghan farmers with the knowledge and means toward producing new, sustainable crops that have both domestic and export value.  The Bush Administration does not support such a plan however.  Could Afghanistan become another Columbia solution?

It’s good to see Mr. Bush preassuring Sudan in light of the recent NY Times article on weapons shipments to the Darfur region.  The al-Bashir regime has been sending shipments of arms under the cover of a fake UN airplane (painted over) to fuel the genocide in Darfur.  Hopefully these are not vain warnings.  But what is really needed is not only US leadership, but a UN peacekeeping force, led by NATO or a European nation willing to take responsibilty.  If it was so easy to build a coalition against Iraq, it should be much easier to do so with Sudan, especially given the moral justifications.